It Is All About Innovations

Many consider cryptocurrencies a false dream of fast richness pursued by people in late 2017 and early 2018. However, there is much more behind the idea of decentralisation. With the current bearish market stimulating innovations, it may be only just year 2019, when we will see some fruit of the endeavour of many new tech companies.

Although we can be sure that most of the projects guaranteeing unfounded richness and ICOs promising endless growth are just scams, some of the may actually change the world. That is why we consider innovation as the most important word to characterise the whole crypto community.

ICOs Speeded It Up

What if you have a brilliant idea but do not have the money to back it up? You will probably try to get some or die knowing that you could achieve something great but did not take the opportunity to do so. The ancient problem of fundraising seems to be cured with the new ICOs and STOs. The investors can instantly allocate any financial sum to the project they choose and receive some bonuses as a payback.

With various scandals involving ICOs, countries are adopting stricter law polices. However, once the policies take a final shape, the idea of funding will probably live on in more mature and safer shape. The existence of a legal framework may even convince larger companies and institutions to enter the market and provide their money to entrepreneurs who would otherwise have zero chance to be funded.

Lightning Payment Processing

One of the most exciting assets on the market and current #2/#3, Ripple´s XRP, is designed to significantly hasten up the payment processes. It allows closing the cross-border transaction in less than a minute for a negligible fee. The cooperation with banks and financial institutions helped XRP to reach the status of a soaring asset with a great future. It has also pushed up the current transaction systems which are trying to cope up with its speed. The competition is always beneficial for the client.

XRP is not the only crypto that aims at the fast payment processing. The father of all coins, Bitcoin, has started to utilise the Lightning network which dramatically speeds up the transaction process. Previous nine-minute money transfers are now reduced to about ten seconds. It is now possible to use a ledger to pay in stores almost as quickly as by debit card. While Bitcoin was well known for the problems with scalability, the new innovative system could help to remedy them.

Personalised DApps

Everyone has different needs, and Etherum-based DApps should help to fulfil them. The acronym DApps stands for Decentralised Applications and works as a platform to create apps that suit the user´s needs directly. You may point out that such concepts like Uber or Letgo already exist. Maybe you do not see any room for this idea. However, these applications utilise a mediator to perform the desired tasks and third-party is not always welcome addition.

DApps work directly for the user. Do you want to utilise your car as a taxi? Just create a personalised application, let others download it and earn money. There is no need for a middle-person as you can arrange everything by yourself. Would you like a social site without any censorship? Make an app and run it. Make your own rules. Everything written on the blockchain stays there forever. The Ethereum-based apps use an open source coding which enables them to be improved by every member of the community.

The DApp community does not belong to the biggest ones at the moment. However, analysts consider the decentralised applications as an asset of the future which will speed up the development.

Privacy Improvements

What if we told you that even decentralised cryptos are not entirely anonymous? To handle the transactions and orders they must give up some personal data to the third party. At the end of 2018, it was clear that ZK-STARK and other companies exploring the zero-knowledge cryptography will be successful in the future contributing to an immense increase in the privacy of the payment process.

It is the shift in the privacy issues which may have a significant impact on the whole financial sector. If the cryptocurrencies offered a safer and faster possibility to pay for goods and services, why should customers use traditional currency and debit cards which are entirely controlled by the banks? Such a vision is, however, still more of a utopia, since even the blockchain companies such as Ripple cooperate with the bank sector and try to incorporate their solution into the rules set of traditional institutions.

Just Give It a Shot

As time goes on, it becomes more and more clear that the cryptosphere is not only about currencies. The blockchain technology became an opportunity to reach a new era of innovation and modernisation. With tools to quickly gain required finances, more and more people with promising concepts will enter the scene.

The projects only mirror the strive for decentralisation and privacy. The lightning payments, DApps, and zero-knowledge cryptography are the explicit manifests of the complex vision standing behind cryptos.

This article doesn’t aim to be a financial advice, it’s a mere subjective summary of a crypto & blockchain technologies we find interesting. Of course there are many other uses of above-mentioned technologies, some more promising than others. What is your favorite use case of blockchain? Tell us in the comment section.